Winning various prizes is a goal of many people. A few have
succeeded, and after the flurry that accompany youth and promise,
significant ones can be awarded toward the end of a creative
life. Aaron Jay Kernis earned the biggest — the
Pulitzer — rather early, before turning
forty. He was a runner-up in 1994 and the winner in 1998,
becoming the youngest to be so honored. Four years later he was
given the Grawemeyer, another of the best-known and prestigious
designations for a musician.

A thorough biography from his publisher appears at the end of this
webpage.

Late in 2002, Kernis was in Chicago for performances with the Chicago
Symphony and also for
master classes and other activities. Despite his growing
reputation and ever-increasing discography, he seemed genuinely pleased
to speak with me and to know that I would be playing his music on the
air.

Here is that conversation . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:
Being the winner of two very
prestigious awards, everyone comes to you wanting music. How do
you decide yes or no?

Aaron Jay Kernis:
It’s tricky. It’s actually
very tricky. Often the advice I give to young composers, which
for most of the years that I received commissions I took, is never say
no to anything. When it comes to a point — as
it has, where I simply can’t write all the projects I’m asked to do,
and as the forces get larger and the pieces in size get larger
— then I really have to start to make some decisions.
A lot of it’s based on what feels right to me, what’s something that I
could imagine wanting to do in this period of years.

BD: What
feels right to you now, or what feels right
to you a year from now and two years from now, as you’re getting it
done?

AJK: Well,
this is the thing! I’m already
having to think in five-year — or even more
— periods of time, especially with my next project being an
opera, which I’ve given myself about three years to write. It’s
very difficult to think, “Well, I’ll be an entirely different person in
three years.” So it’s a little tricky for me to say, “Oh, yes, I
want to write this symphony, then the next symphony,” or
whatever. But I’m beginning to have to think that far
ahead. There are pieces — like say a piano
concerto or something that I know will be really, really difficult for
me — that I hope to know, at some point, when
I’ll be ready. Maybe it will be fifteen years from now.
Pieces like that, I intuit that I’m not ready now.

BD: Then, no
matter what you’re doing, you will just
start working on it?

AJK: Probably
at a certain point, if I feel I can
imagine being ready, I’ll start either mentioning it to people or
talking to people that have suggested that kind of piece to me.

BD: Let me
turn the question on its head. When
you’re writing any specific piece, if you get an idea that you think
would work well in a different piece, do you stop and work on it, or do
you just note it down and put it in a drawer?

AJK: I don’t even
note it down. I just make a
mental note of it. Sometimes I’ll write a little comment. I
don’t typically have musical material coming into my head. I have
images about what ideas I like and what colors I’d like to be in a
piece, and I’ll just put that in the back of my mind and go on with
what I’m doing, and then come back to it. If it keeps coming back
to me, I know it’s something that I should pursue.

BD: That it’s
important?

AJK: Yeah
— or that it could
be.

BD: At what
point does it change from a picture image
to a sound image?

AJK: Well,
it’s funny. It sometimes is a sound
image, but it may not be a specific sound image. It may be a
texture. It may be just a tiny bit of a phrase of something that
is very hard for me to describe. It’s often not very specific.

BD: At some
point, though, you’ve got to translate it
into something that’s readable by the horn player and the violinist!

AJK: That’s
the hardest part, yeah. But that
later-on process, that’s something entirely different. The images
are like an early stage, a very early stage. Once I actually get
to writing the notes, I’m not really concerned with those any
more. The images give me a sense of maybe a shape of a piece or
maybe a color to the piece. It’s just some way of sort of tagging
some starting place into the piece, some entryway.

BD: Then do
you work on it in your head specifically,
or do you let it work on you?

AJK: I let it
work on me, yeah.

BD: Once it’s
done, are you merely transcribing it?

AJK:
No! No, no. No, as I said, even when
it’s working on me, those elements are just the beginning of
something. Then it’s actually the hard work of working on the
notes and the phrases. That’s why it’s hard to talk about.
It’s big!

BD: But you
work on it and you work on it, and
eventually you do get it right?

AJK: I try.

BD: How do
you know when it’s right?

AJK: I
feel. There’s a certain point when
you’re getting close to the end of something that I know I’ve gone as
far as I can, and other than some details, it’s done. It’s a
physical feeling.

BD: Is it up
to you, as the composer, to get
everything out of every piece?

AJK:
No. No. I think in certain pieces,
when I really want to cover a lot of emotional terrain in a
particularly big piece, there are many elements, many dramatic
concerns. But I can’t expect to do everything in one piece, or
get everything into one piece. So I don’t have that expectation.

BD: Is it
wrong for us to have that expectation of
you?

AJK: I think
for everything to be in one piece would
be an experience that no one could take in because it would be too
much. I think there has to be some reduction down to an audible,
down to an experiential — something one can experience rather than
everything all at once. We are a maelstrom of emotions and things
going on in our mind. Can you imagine transcribing all of that at
once
into a work of art???

BD: Well
then, are you focusing in on one section of
you in each piece?

AJK: I
wouldn’t say in each piece, but that’s a
difficult question. I don’t know.

BD: Has
winning those prizes put an undue
expectation, either on your part or on our part, for each successive
piece?

AJK: On your
part, I can’t say. On my part, yes
it does. It’s been an interesting experience. I had, as a
teenager and in my early twenties as well, won a number of prizes
— BMI prizes, ASCAP prizes, things like that. And
prizes are, you know, very nice! It’s nice to get a pat on the
back, and a check! It never hurts. Especially in those
earlier years, that kind of recognition was tremendously important to
furthering confidence. It’s great for young composers just to
feel that their work is being recognized by an outside organization, or
other composers. It builds a lot of confidence and a sense that
you should go on. The problem with the Pulitzer Prize was that
initially, it gave me this sense of worry, of, “Oh,
had I just written my best piece, and could I not do anything
more? Was that it?” And it gave a
kind of too much of an expectation, as you said, for the next
piece. I had to let go of that, of course, or otherwise I would
just worry about that incessantly. When I won the Grawemeyer
Award, I did not feel that way. The Pulitzer for the String Quartet was a
surprise. I’m very happy with the piece, but it was just
unexpected at that time. I’m quite young and I thought, “Wow,
this is incredible, at my age!” But I also didn’t expect it for a
chamber piece! So I think when I won the Grawemeyer Award for Colored Field, a piece I feel
really, really close to — and I went through a
lot with — I felt a kind of resolution from
winning that prize. I felt very, very happy.

BD: Is there
a sense of resolution each time you
finish any piece?

AJK: Yes, in
a way, but usually the resolution is
tempered with, “Oh, I have to go on to the next piece.” There are
very few pieces where I actually resolve any musical issue. There
are always things to work on and to work towards in the next successive
works. Lament and Prayer
is one of the pieces that signified for me the end of a series of
pieces. So when I reached that end, it was wrapping up a series
of years of work, but also leaving me to a very uncertain future.
So that moment of resolution passed very quickly!

BD: Now
having the prizes and having the commissions
all lined up year after year, I assume that means that you’re not going
to struggle for money to put food on the table. Has that at all
changed the way you look at your music?

AJK:
On one hand, I struggle so much with
writing music that to have any other struggles is overwhelming.
But there are many other struggles. My wife is pregnant; we’re
going to have twins in a couple of months, which is very exciting, and
will bring me into an area of my life that I have no experience.
I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like, or what it’s going to ask
me for! And of course there’ll be new financial issues and new
time issues and space issues and all of these things.

BD: Sleep
issues?

AJK:
Yeah! So, there’ll be other challenges.

*
* *
* *

BD: You’re a
composer. Are you also a teacher?

AJK: I don’t have a
position as a teacher, but I do
master classes here and there. Last year I taught at Bowdoin for
a week, and have done a number of different residency situations which
I find very gratifying. I like to be more in the role of a mentor
for a short period of time and get to know people in an intense way for
a short period of time. It’s very satisfying. And I feel
I’m not quite yet ready to have a full-time teaching position with the
amount of work that I have to do.

BD: That was
to be the next question if you were
teaching regularly — do you get enough time to
compose. So, do you get enough time to compose?

AJK: I think
pretty much. I have a very
labor-intensive area of my job in Minnesota, which is running a
composer reading program. That takes many months to administrate
and to choose the pieces. And it takes much more time than I
originally expected. I find it incredibly rewarding and great to
see a next new crop of talented young composers get these
readings. I do sometimes really struggle; I do want to take more
and more time with my pieces.

BD: You want
to spend more time with each one, or
just spend more time composing various pieces?

AJK: Lately I
seem to need more time to spend with
each one. I actually hope that changes. It’s not that I
want to spend less time, it’s that I’d like my process to move a little
more quickly.

BD:
Streamline the process a little bit?

AJK: Yeah.

BD: Are you
working at all with a computer?

AJK: I
engrave all my music on the computer.

BD: So it’s
not just the last segment of the process?

AJK:
No. Actually as I write it’s sort of
segmented. I go from my first sketches, and when I’m very happy
with something in a sketch form, I’ll then type it into the computer
and then go back and forth between the piano and the computer.
Then there’ll usually be a later stageof
orchestration. It’s almost like making a short score on the
computer.

BD: Is it
nice to know that instead of guys hammering
on engraving plates, you can actually just make a little change here
and there?

AJK: That’s
one of the very best elements, the
ability to go in and revise very easily.

BD: Then once
your scores are published, they are not
set stone but at least set on paper?

AJK: Yeah,
but I still go back and tinker.

BD: Would you
like there to be a time when the scores
all come from you, and anyone who requests a score will get the latest
touch-up and the latest edition, and make sure that this mistake is
taken out, etcetera?

AJK: I’m more
concerned with the larger ideas
— if I really feel like a section needs to be
re-orchestrated. If there are errata along the way, there may not
have to be a new generation of score every time I find a natural
missing on a note or something. But for the big revisions I’ll
just send the new file to my publisher and basically update the file.

BD: Who is
your publisher?

AJK: Until
1999 I was published by Schirmer, and I’ve
moved to Boosey and Hawkes in the last year and a half.

BD: Any
reason that you want to talk about?

AJK: I wanted
to actually own my own copyrights.

BD: It’s
important to you to retain those rights?

AJK: It’s
become important. Whether it’ll
actually be financially meaningful, I have no idea, but I began to feel
uncomfortable always giving the copyright over and losing a sense of
ownership. That’s really what it’s about, that comfort level.

*
* *
* *

BD: When
you get the piece done and you’ve turned it over — not necessarily the
rights, but the performance — to an ensemble or an orchestra or
conductor...

AJK:
[Interjecting] Well, that comes early on,
really.

BD: ...are
you expecting them to put anything of
themselves into it, or do you want them to perform it exactly as you
have notated?

AJK: Well! Of
course I hope that they’ll put as
much of themselves as they can with their energy and their enthusiasm,
but I do believe that first performances should, to the best of
intentions, reflect pretty carefully what’s in the score so that the
composer can then compare what works and what doesn’t. I’ve had
some experiences, in the last few years especially, where the first
performances were very, very different than what my intentions
were. With one piece that was just revised and re-premiered a few
months ago, I had to wait about two or three years to really hear it as
I wanted to.

BD: Is there
ever a chance that some of these things
which are even quite a bit away from what you intended might turn out
to be better?

AJK: Oh
absolutely, and sometimes they do. But
if I don’t have a chance to hear what mistakes I’ve really made or what
things really work exactly as I’d intended them to, hearing some kind
of other version of a brand new piece helps with neither.

BD: Have you
basically, though, been pleased with the
performances you’ve heard of your works over the years?

AJK: It’s
getting better and better, the more time
there is and the better the materials that the performers perform
from. That’s made a huge difference. But yeah, in the last
two years I’ve written some big pieces where there were a few
situations where the intention of the conductor and my intention were
in conflict.

BD: If a
conductor really miss-shapes your piece,
would you then turn down an offer that he or she would have, to do
another of your pieces, or to do that piece again?

AJK: Well, if
they ask, hope springs eternal.
[Both laugh] The next piece that they do they would have maybe a
better feeling for. I want them to enjoy my piece, and in a way,
if they were performing another piece — an older
piece — I’d feel less uncomfortable because
there would be probably an existing model. So if the new
performance deviated from that, I’m usually more comfortable by the
time I get to a few other performances. I like to see how a piece
evolves from conductor to conductor, provided that the first
performance reflects my intentions.

BD: Get the
first one right and then move from there?

AJK: Yeah.

BD: But then
it can move quite a distance from there?

AJK: Well,
hopefully by that point, by the third or
fourth performance at the latest — hopefully by the second — I’ll have
fixed what I’ve needed to. I’ll have adjusted the tempi, ‘til
they’re really workable and do-able.

BD: Is any of
this becasue we’re learning you from piece
to piece and are getting closer to you because we understand your
history?

AJK: That’s a
lovely thought; it really is.
There are a few conductors that I’ve worked with who have done a number
of pieces, who have a good sense of the different things I’ve done and
how they interrelate, and know where to take very seriously what I’ve
put down and know where to kind of fudge it a little bit and play with
it a little bit. But those are very few. Many conductors or
organizations are doing something for the first time, and they don’t
know my
history; they just have decided to do a piece.

BD: But
you’re represented more and more on
recordings...

AJK: That’s
true.

BD: ...and
several of their friends have done your
pieces, so that you have a little bit of reputation.

AJK: That
helps.

BD: I’ve
asked about performances. Are you
pleased with the recordings that are out? They have a little more
universality.

AJK: Very
pleased! I’m very pleased with the
recordings that have come out, and I’m only sorry that there aren’t
more. There are quite a few, but with the kind of near-collapse
of the recording industry, the first thing to go were any of the major
recording labels recording new music, and particularly American new
music. At least in Europe they could afford to pay those
ensembles, but here it’s been harder. I was very fortunate; I had
a very wonderful situation with Argo label, which, you know, did
wonderful things for five or seven years, and then has stopped.

BD: Are there
some more recordings coming along?

AJK: At this
point there are a few chamber things
that are in the pipeline, but I don’t know when they’re going to come
to fruition. In the orchestra world I just don’t know where the
next recordings are going to come from, and that’s very frustrating to
me because I write a lot of orchestra music.

BD: Do you
want to be known as an orchestra composer?

AJK: I think
just as a composer. I really enjoy
all the different mediums. I feel very at home with vocal music
and with chamber music and orchestra music.

*
* *
* *

BD: Tell me
the joys and sorrows of writing for the
human voice.

AJK:
Oh, I just love it! It’s really my first
love because I was a choral singer even before I was a lousy violinist,
so I don’t really consider that much of anything. But my first
pieces were choral songs, so I really brought that kind of love of
vocal music into my work, in general. There I’ve had pretty
consistently very, very good experiences.

BD: Is that
why you’re eager to get into the opera?

AJK: I’ve
been wanting to write an opera for a long
time, and it feels like a good time. It definitely feels
good. I have a good subject and a good situation.

BD: Is it
good that you also have a performance date
lined up?

AJK: Yeah,
yeah. It hems me in a little bit,
but I think in three years I ought to be able to pull it off.

BD: You’ll
know in a year and a half whether you’re
going to be able to make it?

AJK: I’ll
have to make it!

BD: Let me
ask the easy question — what
is the purpose of music?

AJK: That is
the easy question??? The purpose
of music? [Thinks for a long moment] The first thing, I
think, is just to provide joy, but it’s much more than that. Is
music to do anything? There are so many things... [Pauses
again] To bring about ideas that can’t be expressed in any other
way; to bring us into greater awareness of emotions and feelings and
thoughts that we wouldn’t be conscious of in any other way because of
the non-verbal nature of it. If one is sensitive to the physical
properties of sound — and we all are whether we
know it or not — music changes the boy; it
changes the psyche. So there’s no single purpose; it’s
multi-purpose.

BD: Do you
try to hit some of those purposes all the
time?

AJK: Oh,
yeah! The emotional aspect really has
been central to be able to transform things I feel into the language of
music. That’s really a lot of the way I feel I communicate what’s
most important to me.

BD: When we,
the audience, experience a piece of
music, are we looking directly into your soul?

AJK: That’s a
hard question. You may be
right. It’s hard to say, because certainly when I hear the
pieces, I feel like I’m looking back at myself.

BD: Do you
like what you see?

AJK:
Sometimes I do, and sometimes it’s a little
scary! And sometimes, when I haven’t got it right, it’s a
disaster. It depends, because during the composition process I’m
very, very self-critical. But that doesn’t stop when it goes to
performance! It just continues. The most pleasurable part
for me is when a piece is done and I really feel at home with it, and
know that it’s really finished and that I’ve done my best and I can go
on. There are only a handful of pieces that I just feel pleasure
hearing, and have a sense that I accomplished what I had set out to do.

BD: When
you’re writing these pieces, you’re
obviously looking inward. Do you also have any impression of the
audience that’s going to be hearing it?

AJK:
[Sighs] Well, yes and no. Typically
when I’m writing music, I’m sitting in the audience. I’m acting
as the audience member and I have to be happy with it. I have to
be happy myself as an audience member, not just myself as a composer.

BD: Are there
times when those two fight a little bit?

AJK: Yeah, a
little bit, yeah. But typically I
try to write music that I’m interested in and compels me and expresses
me.

BD: But I
trust you want more than just an audience
of bearded, slightly balding forty-year-olds out there.

AJK:
Yeah. I’m not sure how much control I have
over that. Sometimes I feel frustrated and wish I were
doing a film score. I’ve made a few attempts to put electronic
instruments in pieces — electric guitar in an
orchestra, electric bass, or synthesizer. I’ve done this
repeatedly and I like very much the sound that that adds to the
orchestra world. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the
complexion of the audience that’s coming to that concert’s going to
change. There are much larger issues that I can only hope to chip
away at by occasionally involving myself in educational efforts; trying
to help next generations of composers, so that they will go out and
they’ll be inspired to try to reach younger audiences. But we’re
in real dilemma. We’re in a real problem about our audiences,
though I continue to go back to something [conductor] Gerry Schwarz
said to me, which is that first of all, young audiences can’t afford to
go to the concert hall very often. The next generation, in their
thirties to forties, often are raising families and they don’t have
time to come. It’s only when many people have enough leisure
time, which is after the families are raised, or if the kids are
interested in the music and they bring the parents to it.

BD: But by
then, they’re not in the habit of doing it.

AJK: That’s
right, unless they had done something a
long time before that. That’s what’s been missing — that
stuff much earlier when they were going to school or were in college or
whatever. If you get people excited at that point, it’s something
that they’ll find a way to continue — whether
it’s buying recordings or the occasional concert — and
then come back to later on in life.

*
* *
* *

BD: Are you
optimistic about the future of music,
either composition or performance?

AJK: I’m optimistic
about composition and quality
performance, definitely. I’m very confused about what the
landscape is going to look like. I don’t want to see orchestras
going bankrupt. Do we have too many of them? Are the
administrative ends of the orchestras out of balance — in
size and in budget — with the musicians?
The musicians are definitely being paid what they’re worth, but is that
too much? Is it enough? Is it the right amount?

BD: Is that
something that you as the composer should
be involved with, or should you just be involved with the music?

AJK: Because
I work at Minnesota Orchestra in this
position as New Music Advisor, I’ve found myself fascinated to learn to
be involved in planning discussions and future programming.

BD: So that’s
your other hat?

AJK: Yeah, a
bit, and it’s very interesting to
me. I would certainly like to see more groups. [The
ensemble] “Bang on a Can”
and composers that are working in alternative mediums, I find a lot of
their work very interesting, very compelling. Some days I wish I
was writing for an ensemble of electric guitars and drums. Is
that really me? Is that really what I hear? I don’t think
so, but sometimes I wish it was because I’d like to find my way in that
medium, too! But I think it’s more than just what are the
instruments and what are the sounds? I think it’s the experience
of going to concerts. Can that change? Couldn’t it become
more easygoing, a little more friendly, a little less formalized?

BD: Back to
rock concerts?

AJK: I
thought rock concerts were great! I
actually didn’t really experience them, except a couple at the very end
of my teen years. But why not? I prefer that young
audiences don’t feel a forbidding sense when coming to the concert
hall. I think music should be inclusive and all-embracing, while
of course keeping the patrons and keeping the donor base. The
formality is a very attractive thing, and that sense of religious rite
or religious experience is something that we can definitely have in the
concert hall if we’re in tune with it. It’s a wonderful thing and
somehow I don’t care whether I’m in a tee shirt. I’m very
uncomfortable whenever I wear a tux in a concert. [Both laugh]

BD: Me, too!
I hate to do that! Well, is the
music you write for everyone?

AJK:
No. No, I can’t imagine it’s for
everyone. I don’t think any kind of music is for everyone.
I think there are just too many different kinds of tastes and kinds of
music out there, and so many kinds of audiences that it would be very
hard to touch all of them. My audience seems to be a classical
audience mixed with a new music audience mixed with a younger audience
that is curious to hear new things.

BD: You’re
in your early forties right
now. Are you pleased with where you are at this point
in your career?

AJK: For the
most part, yes.

BD: In the
end, is it all worth it?

AJK:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s worth it. The
stress and the pain of creating, of just finding the stuff that’s deep
inside and then finding a way to translate that out onto the page is a
very difficult process. It’s staring yourself in the face and
dealing with all those things you don’t like to. That’s really
the part that’s hard. Some days it goes well and other days it
doesn’t, so it’s like anything.

BD: Thank you
so much for the time today. I
appreciate it.

AJK:
Sure. You’re welcome.

In 1983, the New York
Philharmonic premiered a work entitled Dream of the Morning Sky
that came from the pen of a 23-year-old composer named Aaron Jay
Kernis. It would result in his national acclaim, and his star would
only grow. He has won honors from ASCAP, BMI, the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for
the Arts and the American Academy in Rome; eventually he went on to be
the youngest composer ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize—awarded for his String
Quartet No. 2 (“musica instrumentalis”) in 1998. He won the
prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition in 2002 for his work Colored
Field,
making him the youngest composer to win that prize as well. He would
also go on to be commissioned by Disney to ring in the new millennium
with his choral symphony Garden of Light. The list of people
who have commissioned and performed Kernis’ work runs a veritable who’s
who of the classical music world, and his list of honors and awards
make him among the most feted composers. He is one of America’s leading
lights, having passed from youthful phenomenon to a genuine potent and
original artist, possessed of an accessible yet sophisticated voice.
“With each new work and new recording,” says the San Francisco
Chronicle, “Kernis solidifies his position as the most important
traditional-minded composer of his generation. Others may be exploring
musical frontiers more restlessly, but no one else is writing music
quite this vivid or powerfully direct.”

In coming down on a
particular side of the now-defunct schism between the avant-garde and
the listening public, Kernis safely sides with neither—hewing, instead,
to his own personal vision of what is beautiful, flowing easily from
moments of dissonance to moments of lyrical resolution. Or, as one
critic wrote: “Kernis is at or near the top of a list of young American
composers who have made it safe for music lovers to return to the
concert hall and enjoy new music that neither panders to nor alienates
audiences.” With this as his raison d’etre, Kernis might well be among
the true postmodernists.

Born in Philadelphia in 1960, Kernis,
largely self taught on violin, piano, and composition, attended the San
Francisco Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music, and Yale
University, working along the way with a diverse array of teachers:
John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, Morton Subotnick, Bernard Rands and Jacob
Druckman. His West to East coast trajectory is betrayed in the wild
catholic range of his influences—everything from Gertrude Stein to
hard-edged rap to the diaphanous musical canvas of Claude Debussy.
Coming up when he did, in the 1980s and 90s, he took from what was
around him—the disparate musics and the collapsing aesthetic
streams—and, gathering influence from his broad swathe of teachers,
forged a rich, distinctive, emotionally immediate music, neither “this”
nor “that” but simply and clearly good. The brilliance of his work
rests on the exuberant splay of his instrumental palette (even when
writing solo or chamber music) crossed with a brooding, poetic depth
cut in sharp relief: wild, visceral, violent passages against calm,
prayer-like quietude. “Kernis,” Michael Fleming wrote in the St. Paul
Pioneer Press, wrote, “is a composer of fastidious technique and
wide-ranging imagination.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, Kernis
composed two deeply contrasting symphonies, works that were to him were
pre- and post-tragic—the tragedy, in this instance, being the first
Gulf War of 1991, an event that affected him deeply. Before it struck,
his 1989 Symphony in Waves (commissioned by the Saint Paul
Chamber Orchestra), a large-scale five-movement work, is of a
particularly colorful bent, caffeinated and lively, but with passages
of overwhelming lyricism; in contrast, his Symphony No. 2
(1991), commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, is an enraged, topical
work, delineated by aggressive, clangorous writing for percussion.

Other orchestral pieces by this accomplished colorist include Newly
Drawn Sky (2005); Color Wheel (2001); Musica Celestis
(1990) for string orchestra; New Era Dance
(1992), commissioned to mark the New York Philharmonic’s 150th
anniversary, which Edward Seckerson called “…Aaron Jay Kernis'
street-smart power-mix circa 1992. Latin salsa and crackmobile rap
meets 1950s jazz;” a violin concerto, Lament and Prayer,
written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World
War II and the Holocaust; Goblin Market (1995), a setting of
Christina Rosetti’s puckish poem for narrator and large ensemble; and Air
for violin and orchestra, commissioned in 1995 by Joshua Bell
(originally for violin and piano, but later reconfigured for orchestra
and premiered in 1996).

His chamber, solo and vocal repertoire is equally colorful and varied: Two
Movements (with Bells) (2007); the salsa-inspired 100 Greatest
Dance Hits for guitar and string quartet from 1993; Quattro
Stagioni dalla Cucina Futurisimo (“The Four Seasons of Futurist
Cuisine”) for narrator, violin, cello and piano; and the piano
quartet Still Movement with Hymn
(1993), commissioned by American Public Radio for Chrisopher O’Riley,
Pamela Frank, Paul Neubauer, and Carter Brey; a song cycle for soprano
Renée Fleming, scored for voice and piano and later orchestrated
and
performed by the Minnesota Orchestra; and the piano suite Before
Sleep and Dreams (1990) written for superstar pianist Antony De
Mare.

Kernis
served for over ten years as new music advisor to the Minnesota
Orchestra and he is currently the Director of Minnesota Orchestra’s
Composers Institute. Each season, in partnership with the American
Music Center, eight or so composers are given the chance to hear their
music performed by a professional orchestra after a week-long immersion
under the trained and experienced eye of the composer.

This interview was recorded at Northwestern University in
Evanston, IL, on November 15, 2002.
Portions (along with recordings)
were used on WNUR in 2003, 2008 and 2009. This transcription was
made and posted on this
website in 2009. It has also been included in the
internet channel Classical
Connect.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been
transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award
- winning
broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago
from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of
2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and
journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM,
as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website
for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of
other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also
like
to call your attention to the photos and information about his
grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a
century ago. You may also send him E-Mail
with comments, questions and suggestions.